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Who Was the Fort Hood Shooter?

The nation's two most sententious conservative columnists have weighed in with their view. Both David Brooks, in the Times, and Dorothy Rabinowitz, in the Wall Street Journal, believe that the evidence—ie, he was a practicing Muslim, and, to boot, he shouted "Allahu Akbar"—shows that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was committing an act of terrorism, rather than having a psychotic breakdown, when he shot dozens of people at Fort Hood last week.

Their analysis is aided by Anwar al-Awlaki, the 9/11-connected imam in Yemen, who had once worked at a mosque in Virginia, with whom Hasan had been in touch, who is saying Hasan is a hero.

Brooks and Rabinowitz take issue with the rest of the media and with the army for pussy-footing around the issue, for not seeing Hasan for what he was: an agent of radical, nihilistic, and vengeful Islam. Their further point is pretty much that liberals fail to see the binary nature of us and them, good and evil, survival and apocalypse in today's world, and that vigilant conservatives appreciate the unique nature of this threat.

It's of course a partisan diagnosis. To see Hasan as a dedicated terrorist rather than, say, an extreme, but particularly American phenomenon—the quiet suburban sort who cracks one day—is both to pump for a hard-bitten, right-wing, conspiratorial, enemy-within view, while disdaining the soft, lefty, psychiatric view (Rabinowitz went after Dr. Phil).